‘I probably would have been, but Kit had a lock fitted.’ Barbara nodded at the door. ‘That’s a new one, with no lock, to symbolise the new admissions policy: my ex-son’s room is open to the public, twenty-four seven. I’ll show it to anyone who wants to see it,’ she said defiantly, then giggled. ‘If Kit doesn’t like it, let him come back and complain.’
‘You had the old door removed, the one with the lock?’ Simon asked.
‘Nigel kicked it down,’ Barbara told him proudly. ‘After the “big bust-up”.’ She mimed inverted commas. ‘It was the only way we could get in. Nigel said, “At least it’s clean”, which was a bit of an understatement – it was cleaner than I could ever get a room to be, that’s for sure. Kit bought his own hoover, dusters, polish, the works. He used to come round once a fortnight and spend a couple of hours in there, maintaining it – you could hear the hoover buzzing away. I don’t think Connie knew what he was doing – she spent so much of her free time round at her mum and dad’s, Kit could come here at weekends and she’d know nothing about it. Nigel and I used to feel sorry for her in her ignorance, shut out of something that was so important to him – as if we were the lucky ones, privy to his secrets, because we knew about his room even if we didn’t know what was in it.’
Barbara shook her head as pride gave way to frustration. ‘We were idiots, letting an eighteen-year-old child lock us out of a room in our own house. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t let Kit close a door against me, let alone lock it. I’d watch him like a hawk, every second of every day.’ She pointed her finger at Simon as if to fix him in place. ‘I’d sit by the side of his bed all night and stare at him while he slept. I’d stand next to the shower while he washed, even stand over him while he was on the toilet. I’d allow him no privacy whatsoever. He’d be horrified if he heard me saying this, and I don’t care. Privacy’s the soil that nourishes all sprouting evils, if you ask me.’
‘Can we have a look at the room?’ Simon asked, finding her repellent. If he’d met her before what she called the ‘big bust-up’, he would probably have felt quite differently about her. She’d have been a different person then. Simon would never have admitted it to anyone, but he often felt disgusted by people to whom exceptionally bad things had happened; his fault, not theirs. He figured it was something to do with a desire to distance himself from the tragedy, whatever it was. If anything, it made him try harder to help them, to compensate.
‘Go ahead,’ said Barbara. ‘I’ll follow you in a minute. I don’t want to get in the way of your first impression.’
Simon turned the handle. As the door swung open, the smell of furniture polish was unmistakeable. Kit Bowskill might not have set foot in his private sanctuary since 2003, but someone had been maintaining it to his high standard since then. Barbara. It was the sort of thing only a mother would bother doing.
‘Don’t fall over the hoover,’ she warned. ‘Unlike all the other rooms in this house, Kit’s actually has things in it.’ She laughed. ‘I got rid of the bulk of what Nigel and I owned about six months after Kit gave us our marching orders. If we didn’t have a son any more, there didn’t seem much point in us having anything.’
The door stood half open. Simon pushed it all the way and walked in. The room was full without being cluttered: bed, two chairs, desk, wardrobe, chest of drawers, a bookcase against one wall with a Dyson vacuum cleaner next to it. Between the bookcase and the too-small window there was a line-up of cleaning products – for glass, for wood, for carpets – next to a grey plastic bucket from which six feather-dusters protruded, a mockery of a vase of flowers.
At first Simon thought the walls were papered, because every inch of wall space was covered, and the ceiling. He quickly saw that it couldn’t be paper; there was no repeated pattern. No designer, not even the most radical, would create something this convoluted and bizarre. Photographs. Simon realised he